Joho the Blog
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March 02, 2005
Tonight I'm leading another discussion at the Berkman Center, open to all. Last time, we talked about Net friendship, and it went really well in part because I only talked for a few minutes at the beginning. It turned into a very interesting, very informal discussion. That's what I'm aiming for tonight as well. I'm going to open with just a few comments. I'm not sure what I'm going to say, but perhaps something like this: We have an image of time as a series of "nows" that march past the razor blade of the present. That's an incoherent view (IMO). It's also inconsistent with our lived experience of time which is far clumpier and invested: We experience time as seasons (annual to daily) and memory (the clustering of what matters to us). We can't get to nows no matter how hard we try. (Important note on the domain of discourse: I'm a westerner. I make no claims about other cultural perspectives.) My hypothesis: It's harder to make the time-is-nows mistake on the Net because on the Net we're directly confronted with our tangly threads of interest. But, because of the way we experience the Net — facing forward, looking at a screen — the fabric of time turns into raveling threads that constantly demand us to re-weave them. I'd like us to talk about how we experience time on the Internet. E.g., I way too frequently go to do something online and three links later can't remember what I was trying to do. At first I thought this was a sign of oncoming old age, and there may be an element of truth to that, but it seems also to be encouraged by the Net itself. I also hope that we talk about the ways in which different Net tools — email, mailing lists, IM, etc. — present time. But obviously if the discussion works, it'll go where it wants. The session is open to all and we serve pizza. 6-7:30 pm tonight at the Baker House [map] [Technorati tag: berkman ] Posted
by D. Weinberger at March 2, 2005 08:09 AM
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Comments
I'd be interested to hear whether the different type of room changes the dynamic at all.
Posted by: Wendy | March 2, 2005 09:00 AM
Time on the internet is a tricky one. The main reason being, is we view time from our individual perspective. We are creatures of habit, we have our tidy little schedules and perceptions. In essence our perception is our reality. At this point the equation has only one variable, the individual. What the internet does is add a million variables to our nice simple equation. Therefore our tidy little perception of time is thrown into a sea of different perceptions/expectations/habits/schedules/cultures/ etc. More or less there are no time zones on the net, no conventions that our habit forming selves can hold onto as foundation. Therefore our perceptions of time can be thrown out of the window.
Posted by: Will | March 2, 2005 10:37 AM
I'll be there. Don't leave me the weirdo Thai peanut pizza. Save me a piece of classic, plain old, no fuss, no muss CHEESE pizza. I hate innovative pizza.
Posted by: Halley | March 2, 2005 12:13 PM
Hey David, it'll be a pleasure to catch up again at the conference this week!
This is a great discussion topic, which I'm sad to miss as I scuttle into town. My meager thoughts are these: Time online is a continuum which I can morph to the demanding needs of my offline schedule (freelancing, raising a son, plus eating, sleeping). For that I am grateful, even though, you are correct, I do have to re-thread my mental needle every time I've been away.
For me, the biggest challenge of time online is that each interactive medium I use has its own speed and its own time warp. Email isn't IM isn't blogging isn't a cellphone text message. As a result I end up using each medium, and have learned that I'm much happier and (I think) my output quality's much improved when I don't tesseract from medium to medium. With these boundaries, I feel I make the most of whatever time I have--long or short.
Deep in my email, I hate to hear the phone ring and woe betide any IMer on deadline...
Posted by: Lisa Stone | March 2, 2005 02:44 PM